Free Healthcare IT Newsletter Want to receive the latest news on EMR, Meaningful Use,
ARRA and Healthcare IT sent straight to your email? Get all the latest Health IT updates from Neil Versel for FREE!

Email Address:

We never sell or give out your contact information.
We respect our readers' privacy.

If you wonder where I’ve been, I’ve, for one thing, been blogging a bit for (very little) pay over at Forbes.com and writing a lengthy cover story for the September issue of Healthcare IT News.

The Healthcare IT News piece actually breaks down into a fairly short lead story and several sidebars, which aren’t all that evident from the traditional Web version. (The digital edition has everything.) For the sake of convenience, here are links to all elements of the cover package:

A while back — three months, to be exact — I asked readers if they had a preferred term to describe “the application of new, personalized technologies to healthcare.” I gave you the choice of digital health, connected health, wireless health, mobile health and telehealth, and surmised that the results would not be conclusive. On that part, I was right:

However, I was surprised that connected health, a relatively underutilized term, did so well and that telehealth got but one vote. Wireless health certainly has kind of become passé, but I was surprised nobody picked it at all.

In any case, these results, however unscientific they may be, are representative of the fact that it is so hard to reach consensus on anything in health IT. They also are symbolic of the silos that still exist in newer technologies.

My last post earlier today got me thinking: we still haven’t reached a consensus on how to describe what some people have dubbed wireless health, mobile health, telehealth, digital health and connected health. Digital health has gotten popular in the past year or two, and the new issue of Health Affairs goes with connected health, but, as I noted, Dr. Joseph Kvedar, founder and director of the Center for Connected Health at Partners HealthCare in Boston, had a lot to do with the topic selection, so there is some inherent bias.

Now that I know how to add polls to blog posts, I figured I’d ask the question. I doubt the results will be scientific and I’m sure they won’t be conclusive, but it will be fun to know what others are thinking.

As a board member of Health eVillages, I’m proud to share this video from rural Lwala, Kenya, where clinicians and other health workers are harnessing the power of mobile technology to deliver better care and, for some people, the first real healthcare they have ever had. This video, from from when Health eVillages Co-Founder Donato Trumato and Program Manager Matt Linder trekked to Lwala in October, shows how mobile health is helping local women deliver healthy babies.

Subsequent to this trip, the Lwala Community Alliance highlighted the work of Health eVillages here. Then, at a Health eVillages board meeting in December, Trumato issued a challenge to raise $150,000 to construct a dedicated maternity ward at the hospital in Lwala by year’s end. Physicians Interactive, of which Trumato is CEO, pledged half that total, and then others far wealthier than I stepped up and helped Trumato met the goal by Dec. 26. Operating funds are still necessary, and Health eVillages (or “Heal the Villages,” as one partner has pointed out) wants to help more people, including some at a site in rural Louisiana.

I got home from the Digital Health Summit at International CES in Las Vegas late Thursday night, and have spend most of the time since them just catching up on things. Among important news I missed was that Stephen Colbert took on health apps on Wednesday, specifically Doctor on Demand. Colbert joked that the app is going to “revolutionize medicine.” (“Why waste time getting an exam when you can just shoot your doctor an emoji of your shattered femur?”)

Ah, yes, revolutionary health apps. It has to be a joke, right?

“Clearly, app-based healthcare is the future of medicine,” Colbert continued, before introducing one of his own, from “sponsor” Prescott Pharmaceuticals.

The Doctor on Demand part starts around 3:30, but the earlier part is pretty funny, too. Some might be offended by this segment.

I will have more on the Digital Health Summit on MobiHealthNews and right here on this blog later this week.

I’m pretty sure CNN never actually posted the full video anywhere online, though the network did share a short teaser clip a couple days before the show, hosted by CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, first aired. However, I did find a full, albeit unverified, transcript of the episode on CNN’s Web site if you care to imagine what the pictures might look like.

Several of the people who were on the show also appeared at USC yesterday, including AliveCor’s Dr. Dave Albert, Zephyr Technologies CEO Brian Russell, Misfit Wearables CEO Sonny Vu and product designer Stuart Karten, as, of course, did Saxon and her Oscar-winning film producer-brother, Ed. I’ll have more coverage Monday in MobiHealthNews.

In the meantime, here’s Friday’s news about AliveCor earning FDA 510(k) clearance for the universal, Android-compatible version of its smartphone ECG, the newly dubbed AliveCor Heart Monitor. I’ll see you next week at CHIME’s Fall CIO Forum in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Happy 5th of July! I hope you had a happy 4th, and that you don’t have to work today as I have to.

I just wanted to let everyone know that I will be on a panel next Thursday at the 10th annual Healthcare Unbound conference at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Denver:

TRACK C: PANEL DISCUSSION: WHAT’S NEXT FOR mHEALTH?

The market for mobile health (mHealth) products and services is an important area which can be a catalyst for healthcare’s evolution, dramatically altering healthcare delivery and the patient experience. In the health system of the future, patient care will be greatly enhanced by a connected and seamless information flow between patients and other stakeholders, with mobility being a core need for all users of health information. With a growing ocean of mHealth applications, scalability, sustainability, security, interoperability are some of many points which will continue to be vital for developers.

mHealth can provide new ways for patients to be engaged in their health, beyond those interested in the “quantified self”, to shift the focus in healthcare from treatment to wellness. The healthcare industry therefore has the unique chance to harness this opportunity to create positive change.

There is the argument that regulation and restrictions could impede innovation, as the freedom of the market has fostered the rapidity of modernization in mHealth technology. However, other hurdles exist for developers, such as achieving adoption and sustained use of mobile applications, where users from physicians, to patients need to better understand what apps can make a real difference and which are just noise.

The panel will explore some of the ways mHealth is transforming healthcare and also tackle some of the serious questions, offering insight and solutions for those facing mHealth’s distinct challenges.
Moderator:Daniel Ruppar, Research Director, Connected Health, Frost & Sullivan

This breakout session starts at 4:15 p.m. MDT. As the last thing standing between conference attendees and happy hour that day, we sure had better be engaging. Hopefully there will be video available after the fact. If there is, you can be sure I will post it here.

As you may know, I am on the advisory board of Health eVillages, The program got a huge honor Monday by being featured in a video shown at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference — you know, the annual meeting that’s always a hot ticket among Mac-heads and app developers because Apple usually unveils its latest products there. (Last week was no exception. Apple CEO Tim Cook introduced iOS 7, albeit to mixed reviews.)

In the video, called, “Making a difference. One app at a time,” Apple highlighted Skyscape, the company that makes the mobile medical reference software that Health eVillages, and sent a camera crew to a Health eVillages pilot site in rural Lwala, Uganda. A nurse from the clinic showed how he visits patients by motorcycle, using an iPad to help treat and educate the area’s residents. (Skyscape parent company Physicians Interactive provides operational support to Health eVillages, and CEO Donato Trumato, also featured in the video, co-founded the program with Kerry Kennedy.)

Two of the other three apps that Apple chose to include also are related to healthcare: Galileo, an app from Orthocare Innovations that helps amputees adjust prosthetic limbs; and Proloquo2Go, a product from AssistiveWare that in the video helped an apparently autistic child learn to speak.

Here’s a short video (720p HD) I put together from the just-concluded American Telemedicine Association’s annual conference in Austin, Texas. No wonder it’s so hard to get a real sense of the size of the telehealth and telemedicine market when there are so many components and so many different definitions. This is a row of banners outside the meeting rooms highlighting the various types, not to mention some of the ATA’s constituencies and important topics at the conference. I did the voice-over at 1:30 in the morning.

Free Healthcare IT Newsletter Want to receive the latest news on EMR, Meaningful Use,
ARRA and Healthcare IT sent straight to your email? Get all the latest Health IT updates from Neil Versel for FREE!

Email Address:

We never sell or give out your contact information. We respect our readers' privacy.